From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

John Sanford (1904 – March 5, 2003) was an American author.
Born Julian Lawrence Shapiro in Harlem, New York City, he was a childhood friend
of author Nathanael West. Young Julian studied law
at Fordham
University, but when West told him that he was writing a book,
Julian decided that was what he wanted to do with his life.

He had stories published in European literary journals, and in 1933 wrote
his first novel, The Water Wheel. When he published his
second novel, following West's example, Julian Shapiro changed his
name to John Sanford because of his concerns that anti-Semitism would hurt sales of a book by
an author with a Jewish name.

In 1936, Sanford signed a writing contract with Paramount
Pictures. It was there that he met fellow writer Marguerite
Roberts, and the two married two years later. They collaborated on
the film Honky Tonk in 1941. Soon afterwards, Sanford was
offered a writing contract by MGM, but Roberts urged him to reject the
contract and concentrate on writing books, which he did.

Sanford was a member of the Communist Party,
and his wife, Roberts, accompanied him to a few Party meetings, but
she never devoted herself to the cause, although she did join the
Party. This cost the couple in the 1950s, when they were called
before the House Un-American
Activities Committee. Roberts spent ten years on the Hollywood
blacklist. Ironically, in 1969 Roberts wrote True
Grit, starring anti-Communist actor John Wayne. Wayne's biographer noted that
Wayne called Roberts' work "the best script I have ever read."

In 1964, Sanford wrote the novel Every Island Fled
Away, but it was The People From Heaven which has
been called by some his master work. The story of a racist in a
small town who rapes an African American woman, beats a Native American
and tries to drive the only Jew out
of town, it was attacked by Sanford's fellow Communists as
"antisocial", but Sanford's early role model William Carlos Williams called
it "the most important book published here in the last 20
years."

Sanford eventually turned from fiction to write history and
autobiography. But his works were distinctive, in that they tended
to be made up of small vignettes that dramatized history, bringing
it alive. His A More Goodly Country, a history of the
United States, consists of more than 200 vignettes as seen through
the eyes of such participants as Leif Ericson, Christopher Columbus, Henry David
Thoreau, Pocahontas, Stephen Crane, Albert Einstein and Eleanor
Roosevelt. It took him three years to complete. It was turned
down by 247 publishers, before finally being published. It was
dedicated to Williams.

Marguerite Roberts died in 1989, and the last few years of
Sanford's life were largely dedicated to writing about his
relationship with his wife. Despite failing eyesight, he continued
to write until a month before his death at the age of 98.

Sanford published eight novels, five works he called "creative
interpretations of history" and 10 volumes of autobiography and
memoirs, including the five-book sequence, Scenes From the Life
of an American Jew. Four more unpublished works were
discovered among his effects.

An
abbreviated Bibliography

The Color of the Air: Scenes From the Life of an American
Jew

Adirondack Stories

Every Island Fled Away

Intruders in Paradise

Maggie: A Love Story

A More Goodly Country: A Personal History of
America

The People From Heaven

A Very Good Land to Fall With

The View From Mt. Morris: A Harlem Boyhood

A Walk In The Fire

The Water Wheel

The Waters of Darkness

The Winters of that Country: Tales of the Man-made
Seasons

To Feed Their Hopes: A Book of American Women

View From this Wilderness: American Literature as
History

An excerpt from Sanford's Pearl Harbor segment of A More Goodly
Country:

This time, the air was stiff with sound, and if God had
chosen to speak, He'd've found no room for His radiant waves among
the waves already there. Adore and be still! He might've said, but
only other planets would've heard. The earth was listening to
recipes, to longing sung and played, to the scores made in games;
it was also listening to the traffic of ciphered signals to and
from Japan, but that was merely noise behind eulogies of oleo,
spiels for gasoline. There was wind in the east, and coming on the
wind was rain, but no sign of these could be seen as yet -- the sky
was still clear, and it might stay fine all day.